Autre Ne Veut – Age of Transparency

After his scrappy, hazy debut, pop experimentalist Autre Ne Veut – aka Arthur Ashin – struck critical gold with 2013’s Anxiety. Its singular, timeless, and consistently flavoured grooves, at once tender and heart-crushingly potent, put his name on the map. Age of Transparency is, conversely and perhaps ironically, somewhat opaque, wrong-footing us with fickle gear changes.

Like the record overall, opener On And On (Reprise) is many things: a soulful, glitching a cappella blending into pitch-warped jazz licks before climaxing, noisily and symphonically, with Ashin’s falsetto pleading and wailing. Then, for tracks like the laser-gospel Cold Winds, or the cocky Switch Hitter, ANV sidesteps to his synthesiser, and we’re back to Anxiety’s oblique pop sensibility.

Age of Transparency flits ­from slow to fast, from choral to RnB, from stripped-back to orchestral to electronic. It’s a hot‘n’cold treatment, sure, but rather than employing variety for variety’s sake, the album has a closed-eyes naturalism to it that must, surely, come from an artist channelling something real. [George Sully]